Yost fired
DMZ · September 15, 2008 at 2:37 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Quick post: this is crazy! Milwaukee get swept, and he’s out, even though they’re in the middle of a pennant race! I’ve never heard of something like this happening in baseball.
Dave adds: It’s impossible to know for sure, but his handling of the bullpen yesterday was so horrible that I wouldn’t be surprised if Doug Melvin just decided that there’s no way he could trust MelvinYost to be the in game strategist in a playoff series.
Holy cow! They are tied for the Wild Card for heaven’s sake!
Never heard of this before but they’re in the race and they pulled the trigger on him watch them fall from contention… who is the replacement?
I think John McLaren is available…
Dale Sveum is the replacement, which is also strange because Ted Simmons was long considered to be the potential replacement for Yost, but also seems to be on the way out.
One thing’s for sure: Doug Melvin does things his own way, and isn’t afraid of looking insane.
Hm so now there is one more Manager on the list for the M’s now that Yost lost his job…
What happened with the bullpen yesterday?
I’ve heard some criticism from Red Sox fans about Dale Sveum when he was the Red Sox 3B coach for a while…
Of course they’ve complained about just about every 3B coach since poor Wendall Kim, so that’s to be taken with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, if a guy does some rather rash and rally-killing stuff as a 3B coach, I wonder just how long a leash Sveum has as “interim manager”?
Too many Melvins there
In 1991, Jim Lefebere guided the M’s to their first winning in history (83-79) and promptly was fired after the season ended. No one in baseball could figure out that one either. (He was replaced by Bill Plummer, whose team finished 1992 at 64-98. In 1993, enter Sweet Lou.)
But that wasn’t *in* a pennant race, while contending.
yup, he got reassigned to the dreaded “advisory role”
the Brewers blog at the Journal Sentinel is interesting– and also interesting is that Ryan Braun appears to be team spokesmodel.
Basic overview of Melvin’s bullpen foibles from yesterday:
3-3 tie, bottom 8th, Jayson Werth singles to lead off the inning. So the situation is man on first, no out, Utley and Howard coming to bat. Yost brings in Shouse, his LOOGY, to go after the two lefties. No problem so far.
Utley sacrifices Werth to second, so now, the runner is at second base with one out and Ryan Howard is hitting.
Yost then intentionally walks Howard (.212/.287/.410 vs LHP this year) to put runners at first and second and setup the double play, bringing up RHB Pat Burrell. Probably a bad idea, but setting up the double play has some value that late in a tie game.
He then leaves Shouse in to face Burrell, which is unbelievably dumb. Shouse is a pure LOOGY and should never face a tough RHB in a high leverage situation. Ever. Burrell’s a pretty good RH hitter. Burrell singles, Phillies take the lead 4-3.
Yost then leaves in Shouse to face switch-hitting Victorino, who hits a 3 run bomb to basically seal the win.
In the end, Yost had a really good LOOGY intentionally walk a LH bat who can’t hit lefties so that he could face two RH hitters in a situation where a hit probably costs them the game.
That’s just so bad, it’s probably a fireable offense.
Would Yost be a good fit for the M’s?
Still this is a crazy situation.
Which is more crazy: Firing Yost with the team in the middle of a WC race or hitting Vidro in the 3-5 spot 80% of the time during the season??? And which is worse…watching a manager do that at the beginning of the season where you might have a chance or continuing to do it even when you have absolutely no chance of making the playoffs? Wouldn’t we ALL have loved for a Mariner GM with balls like Melvin to come bursting into the dugout right after the lineup is posted and say “I can’t take this any longer! You don’t know what the hell you’re doing…you’re fired!”
How I dream of that kind of passion in some Mariners leadership!
Would Yost be a good fit for the M’s?
Lemme see, doesn’t know how to manage a bullpen -check!
Still, even the unimaginative-to-the-point-of-baffling, reflexive, toadying-up-to-conventional-wisdom crapness of Bob Melvin and Mike Hargrove rarely did something as daft as walking an LH Batter in order to have your LOOGY face a couple of righties.
This kind of firing is pretty common in the NHL. The NJ Devils have done it a couple of times recently. A few years ago they fired the coach while they were in first place (I’m pretty sure) and then won the Cup with the replacement.
Yeah, and Michigan won the NCAA basketball championship when Bo Schembechler fired Bill Frieder with one week to go in the season (because Frieder had publicly agreed to coach Arizona State the next season).
Firing Yost right now probably has a lot to do with the Brewers’ late-season collapse last year, with this year shaping up as a repetition.
Re: Sveum
All teams hate their third base coaches.
The thing is that Yost has struggled with bullpen management for the past few years. Brewers fans were in an uproar over his bullpen strategy last year, which played a part in the team’s folding in the second half.
Instead of firing him prior to this year, when this glaring weakness already known, they fire Yost in during the last few weeks of a tight pennant race. . . .
I would have loved to be in the room when Melvin (who was obviously trying to wait for the season to play out before making any decisions) just said: “Fu** it. I’m firing this a**hole.”
I was 11 when that happened and it holds a special place in my heart because it was the first time I ever questioned a Front Office decision. It’s like the first time you see a movie and you walk out thinking: “You know what, that just wasn’t very good.” (AKA The Rocketeer) The Mariners firing Jim Lefebvre opened me up to a whole new world full of skepticism and critical thinking.
So thanks M’s Front Office. I’m a better man for all your baffling and illogical moves.
I have not seen this in baseball…but it does happen in sports. See Lou Lamoriello (GM)and the New Jersey Devils.
-On April 2, 2007, Lamoriello took over as interim head coach after firing Claude Julien. The firing took place with three games left in the season, when the Devils had the second-best record in the conference and were on their way to setting a franchise record for regular season wins.
Now that is crazy.
Sveum was disliked by Sox fans as a third base coach because he was crazily aggressive.
Just because much criticism of third base coaches is silly doesn’t mean it’s never merited. And the present third base coach, Demarlo Hale has a pretty good rep with Sox fans, as far as I can tell.
He was supposedly a tremendous worker behind the scenes keeping the hitter spray charts, positioning the fielders etc.
On the radio before tonight’s Red Sox game they were equally dumbfounded by this firing but noted that Sveum is likely to be a much more low key skipper than Yost apparently was.
Oh, and mustard, a few years before that the Devils fired their coach with 9 games left in the season . . . and then went on to win the Stanley Cup!
Well, that’s not necessarily the case here, as Doug Melvin is quoted as saying that the decision to fire Yost was a “collaborative one”.
Here’s the exact quote from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
And, yes, the “Madison” in my name refers to Madison, Wisconsin. And from the reaction from the media and fans here in the state(heck, just from the posts at Brew Crew Ball alone), this is a good thing, by and large–a surprise, to be certain, but a good thing, as Dave detailed the horrible decisions made by Yost during the doubleheader with the Phillies this weekend.
(Not to mention Yost’s decision to use catcher Jason Kendall for all 18 innings of said doubleheader. What’s that, you’re tired, Jason? Tough noogies!)
Baker reminds us of Dick Williams’ September ’81 firing in Montreal…
pshaw. they woulda hadda pry the ball out of Kendall’s chaw-stained mitt
Ownership got fed up with his poor decisions as a manager and that he couldn’t get his team to get out of there hitting slump. Upper management pulled the trigger to get CC and the team is responding by hitting poorly.
Here are some of the batting averages for sept.
Fielder .239
Braun .192
Hardy .190
Cameron .122
Hart .176
Kendall .186
Its amazing they are still in a playoff race.
German soccer club Fortuna Cologne once fired its manager during the halftime of a match.
Yost apparently wasn’t getting along well with the clubhouse. Along with the bad bullpen management, it’s possible that a team mutiny was imminent, the last thing you need with 12 games to go in a playoff race.
Ri-iiight…that’s Yost’s fault.
You’ve got to lay off of the ESPN.
What are these “batting averages” of which you speak? It sounds like they’re some kind of primitive statistical measure of hitting.
It’s not fair that Yost was fired. He has a team with exactly one guy in the starting lineup with an OBP over .340 (Fielder). That’s not a play off bound team, really. Also, the Brewer’s bullpen sucks, so I’m not sure that Yost really had great options. (Though as someone exceptionally skeptical of intentional walks, I can’t really endorse skiping to Howard to throw at Burrell. BTW: Dave, you were using understatement when you called Burrell “pretty good” right?)
Anyway, here’s the question on which I think all the readers want the very good opinion of the bloggers here: how likely is Yost to get a job with the M’s and how good or bad is he?